By way of conclusion, I must first underline something which I hope is already clear, even if it has not been my main point. When post-postmodern communicational critics identify a literary use of cultural memory which is not negatively capable, a use, for instance, such as Haley’s in Roots or Beaumont’s in much of The Crowne of Thornes, a use which sharply separates one community or sub-community from another, they may well feel obliged to respect the defensive narrowness and exclusiveness of this. As I said at the outset, the post-postmodern dream of a non-hegemonic globalization is tempered by a strong sense that systematic and violent injustice not only preceded, but still lives on after, postmodernity’s democratizing maelstrom. Indeed, there probably always has been, and probably always will be a need for a very robust politics of recognition. In the past, that strategy’s way of defining marginalized identities has risked oversimplifications which, insofar as they suggested that the difference between one grouping and another is “all the way down” (Miller 1995), did not immediately improve the chances of genuine communication across the board. Yet both now and in the future, if the same grave drawback were to recur, it should arguably be tolerated, in the hope that emergent identities and their cultures, having once become perceptible to other groupings, will gradually enter into fuller dialogue with them, within a larger, egalitarian community that is indefinitely large and indefinitely heterogeneous (Sell 2004).
I repeat: indefinitely heterogeneous. The post-postmodern ideal of community most definitely does not entail a levelling out of differences. The ideal community’s members would not conform, except in a profoundly eirenic relish of each other’s othernesses. This would involve, as one might put it, the politics of recognition in a new, post-culture-wars phase of reciprocated empathy. Stridency, barricades, and inhumanly narrow identity scripts would be firmly relegated to the past.
2 Roger D. SELL Cultural Pemory and the Fommunicational Friticism…
One of the things a communicational critic singles out for positive emulation is any use of cultural memory which promotes the growth of just such a community:
uses which are inclusive without claiming a solidarity that is insincere, and without coercion; uses which work, rather, in a spirit of negative capability that is at once frank and deferential. In their different ways, D’Aguiar’s The Longest Memory, Phillips’s Cambridge, Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Vassanji’s The In-Between World of Vikram Lall, Barker’s The Regeneration Trilogy, Kipling’s Kim, Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, and Beaumont’s Bosworth Field all have these qualities. In cases like these, cultural memory is a resource that is polyvalent, and not so much the fundamentalist shibboleth of some very circumscribed identity, as the exponent of those kinds of personal hybridity and rainbow coalition by which differences are most fruitfully negotiated. Although, in both literary and other spheres of life, differences are nothing less than the communal life-blood, the less a memory is experienced as eternally available to just some single grouping, the more it contributes to genuine communication. In an ideal world as we are beginning to conceive of it today, cultural memory would be open to discussion from every quarter.
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